A Japanese film about real people and their struggles, a little wordy but totally believable

The 2017 Japanese film After the Storm may not be a great film - perhaps a little too long, a little too talky, a little too much at times like a stage drama - but it has a lot of strengths and is worth a look. The story in brief concerns an elderly Japanese woman living in a low-rent housing project in an unnamed, small city, and her difficult relationship with her adult son, Ryoko, who as we gradually learn has a serious gambling problem. Ryoko, oddly enough, is a successful crime writer - had at least 1 novel published to some acclaim - now struggling w/ the followup, and who has taken a job as a private detective - he says it's to get material for his book, but obviously he needs the money, and in fact he engages in some really underhanded practices, blackmailing his own clients for example. In other words, he's a sleazy and disreputable guy - but w/ some winning qualities to be sure. He keeps trying to make good - hoping against hope to restore money he's lifted from his mother, promising to keep up on his child-support payments - and he truly wants to be involved in the life of his 10-year-old son, but he's on a downward course (with the ominous note that the son seems fascinated by lottery tickets - picking up on the malady of his dad and, as we also learn, his grandfather). All told, he's a truly believable character, and by the way one of the very few writers depicted in film in a realistic and credible manner: One look at his apartment and his desk and you know he's a real writer (unlike the typical romanticized view of the suffering writer who composes in flashes of brilliant insight or suffers through "writer's block" in ecstasy - see the Pitt-Jolie ridiculous movie on this them, or rather, don't). In fact, that's the great strength of this film: all of the characters seem real, true-to-life, struggling with life's problems as we all do; there's not a moment of melodrama or cinematic gaucherie, with one exception: the odd scene in which mom, dad, and son go out onto a playground in the midst of a typhoon, and, worse, the son "loses" some lottery tickets and they go into a park and find them one by one - they would have been blown to Seattle by that time!